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Csound
 

Information About

Csound




the 1990s and 2000s, led by John Ffitch at the University of Bath, resulting in the launch of Csound 5 in February, 2005. Many developers have contributed to it, most notably Istvan Varga, Gabriel Maldonado (who developed a variant of the system, CsoundAV, which includes image and graphics processing extras), Robin Whittle, Richard Karpen, Michael Gogins , Matt Ingalls , Steven Yi and Victor Lazzarini .

Csound takes two specially formatted Text File s as input. The ''orchestra'' describes the nature of the instruments and the ''score'' describes notes and other parameters along a timeline. Csound processes the instructions in these files and renders an Audio File or real-time audio stream as output.

The ''orchestra'' and ''score'' files may be unified into a single structured file using XML tags. Here is a very simple example of a unified Csound data file which produces a Wave File containing a one second Sine Wave tone of 1 KHz at a Sample Rate of 44.1 kHz:


;


csound -W -d -o tone.wav



sr = 44100 ; Sample rate.
kr = 4410 ; Control signal rate.
ksmps = 10 ; Samples pr. control signal.
nchnls = 1 ; Number of output channels.

instr 1
a1 oscil p4, p5, 1 ; Simple oscillator.
out a1 ; Output.
endin



f1 0 8192 10 1 ; Table containing a sine wave.
i1 0 1 20000 1000 ; Play one second of one kHz tone.
e





Developed over many years, it currently has a vast amount of opcodes (modules). One of its greatest strengths is that it is completely modular and expandable by the user.

Csound is closely related to the underlying language for the Structured Audio extensions to MPEG-4 , SAOL .

As with many other programming languages, writing long programs in Csound can be eased by using an integrated environment for editing, previewing, testing, and Debugging . The latest version of the software, Csound 5, is currently available in binary and source code for Linux, Windows and MacOSX. It is a much improved and expanded version of the original software, available also in the form of a library and API, which can be used by other software. In addition to the basic C API, there are also Python, Java, LISP, Tcl and C++ APIs.


SEE ALSO




EXTERNAL LINKS

  • Official website contains FAQs, manuals, programming examples, other front end programs, and misc other goodies. The mailing list archive is also a good place to find detailed information.

  • CSound Wiki CSound Documentation




  • WinXoundPro another IDE for CSound.

  • Dex Tracker Dex Tracker a tracker style front end for csound Including a grid editor and code generation tools, and the ability to save your favorite sounds and rhythms as presets

  • blue A music composition environment for Csound.

  • CsoundWiki Community site.

  • Bol Processor A music composition environment for Csound and MIDI